A powerful, affecting second effort.
Cruz (Soledad, 2001), chronicler of New York Dominican life, traces a family’s embittering struggle to establish itself between a revolutionary Dominican Republic (circa 1965) and early 1990s Bronx.
Don Chan of Los Llanos, D.R., is the patriarch and anchor of this somber tale. A Chinese who somehow washed up on the beach when he was a child, he ended up marrying the same woman, Caridad, who discovered and took care of him 70 years before, and with whom he tended a farm he acquired during the revolutionary days of the mid-60s. But Caridad has died, and Don Chan leaves his country for the first time in 1991 to live with his son and family in New York City, where Santo and Esperanza fled ten years prior to work as a cab driver and nurse’s aide, respectively, while trying to raise two children in a better life. To Don Chan, however, they live like rats, in a tiny, noisy apartment with much crime, fear and no trees; he fires Santo up remembering the good old days when the peasants, led by Don Chan and the prophetic teenager Miraluz, organized themselves and tried to resist the rich dictator Trujillo, even briefly voting in their own president, Juan Bosch. Yearning for home proves too much for Santo, who becomes the tragic casualty of a cab holdup, while Esperanza, educated on Dallas reruns, rejects her past as a defeat and disastrously embraces the acquisitiveness of America. Their children, most unfortunately, are caught up in this generational mayhem, and Don Chan, resistant to the changes of the present, adrift in Nueva York, gradually loses hold of his sanity. Cruz handles this sad tale with dignity devoid of melodrama. She demonstrates enormous affection for her characters without sentimentalizing their naivete or ignorance. Her Esperanza, for example, is a silly, greedy creature, willfully self-disillusioned yet also tremendously adaptable and devoted to her family.
A powerful, affecting second effort.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1203-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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